1. Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to communications between public and private electronic environments. More particularly, the present invention relates to synchronous communications between a public electronic environment and a private electronic environment.
2. Background Information
The protection of sensitive electronic data has often resulted in that data being placed in a private electronic environment not accessible from a public electronic environment. For example, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications are large, expensive and complex computer programs that track massive volumes of commerce data (e.g., base prices, customers, contracts, tax conditions, etc.) and perform various functions for sellers of goods and services. Due to the sensitive nature of the types of information tracked by ERP applications, from both the buyer and seller perspective, the ERP applications have resided on private, secure computer networks, and have not been accessible from public computer networks.
However, with the increasing use of and dependence on public computer networks, such as, for example, the Internet, for everything from communications to electronic business transactions, the inaccessibility of ERP applications has posed problems. For example, organizations participating in electronic commerce have discovered that the inability to access ERP applications from public computer networks has made it very difficult (and generally impractical) to provide accurate, real time information in electronic transactions.
Where a merchant organization has had the resources, elaborate schemes have been used to make it seem to the customer that the information is provided effortlessly, when in fact much manual maneuvering is going on in the background. Where a merchant organization has not had the resources, it simply either has not provided some of the information it would like to provide to customers (and/or which customers are requesting), or has forced the customer to go outside the electronic transaction to obtain the information (e.g., call the merchant on the telephone). Under either scenario, it would be vastly more efficient to be able to communicate with ERP applications from outside the private computer networks on which they reside. In addition, extremely complex computer architectures have been theorized as necessary to accomplish secure communications with a back end ERP application.
Thus, a need exists for relatively simple, real time communications between public electronic environments and private electronic environments, while still addressing security concerns.